A Berkeley nuclear engineering professor has dismissed a viral video which appears to show unusually high radiation readings on a beach in San Francisco, asserting it has no link to the ongoing Fukushima crisis in Japan.

As we reported yesterday, a YouTube clip shows an individual taking radiation readings with a Geiger counter on a beach south of Pillar Point Harbor in San Mateo County. The readings show at least five times the normal background radiation level.

Health officials investigated and confirmed the spike but said they were “befuddled” as to its cause, suggesting that “red-painted disposable eating utensils” may have been responsible.

During an interview with news station KPIX, Berkeley Professor Edward Morse claimed that the video proved nothing.

“Someone going around with a Geiger counter is likely to discover these great variations in levels from time to time,” said Morse, adding, “That’s absolutely no correlation with anything that happened in Fukushima.”

The clip then shows Morse measuring “rocks” for radiation with a Geiger counter and receiving abnormally high readings.

Despite Morse’s dismissal, experts at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems in Spain have concluded that the plume of radioactive cesium-137 released by the Fukushima disaster in 2011 will begin reaching U.S. coastal waters in early 2014.

KPIX also spoke to Gene Herman of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, who said people should remain wary of the potential threat posed by radioactive Fukushima debris and toxic sea water.

Whether the ongoing Fukushima crisis poses a genuine threat to Americans on the west coast or not, official denials that there is any problem count for very little since authorities habitually lie about public health crises in the name of preventing panic, an infamous example being the EPA’s post 9/11 assurance that the air at ground zero was safe to breathe, which led to at least 20,000 people suffering debilitating illnesses as well as many deaths.

The continued duplicity of the Japanese government and TEPCO officials in lying about the true scale of the radiation release from Fukushima has also increased suspicions. In September it was confirmed that radiation readings around the power plant were 18 times higher than previously reported by TEPCO.